Running Toward the Hurt

“When the Lord saw the widow, his heart went out to her . . . . ” Luke 7:13-14

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Emmanuel Church
June 9, 2013

Commencement at Harvard is always an exciting time of year, and as one of the University’s chaplains, I have the privilege of participating in the full complement of these end-of-the-year festivities.  It is an emotionally complex time:  on the one hand, there is great joy over degrees obtained and prizes won; a sense of satisfaction, accomplishment, and pride.  But on the other hand, there is an impending sense of loss and pain, as students realize that a wonderful chapter of their lives is coming to a close and that many of the relationships that have sustained them these past several years on campus will be changed forever as everyone moves on with their lives.  There is also a sense of anxiety about the future, particularly these days, when the economy is so uncertain and the world seems so full of risk.

Part of my role as chaplain is, of course, to be a companion to my students as they sort through these feelings.  It is not that I have any answers for them.  I have no better sense of the future than they do.  But I do have the ability to be a compassionate listener and to share with them my deep conviction, my faith, that, whatever the future holds, they will not be alone, as God will accompany them on their journeys, wherever they may lead.

Chaplains are not the only ones who seek to provide comfort and guidance to students at this time of year.  There are also Commencement speakers.  And Harvard’s Commencement Week is, for better and for worse, full of such speeches.  For the most part, they are forgettable, riddled with platitudes and shopworn bits of advice.  This year, as you no doubt heard, there was a fair amount of hoopla because Oprah Winfrey was the keynote Commencement speaker.  Oprah did a fine job, but truth be told, her remarks were overshadowed by those of two lesser known speakers:  the first was the Baccalaureate address given by Harvard President Drew Faust and the second was the Graduate Student Address given by master’s student Jon Murad.

Faust’s words to the graduating seniors harkened back to the events of that dreadful Monday when the bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, a day that will forever mark these graduates’ college memories just as 9/11 marked their childhoods.   Faust’s focus, though, was not on the violence or the terror or their complex social causes, but rather on the profound existential questions such crises provoke and how we respond to them.  Moments like these, she observed, force us to confront life’s bigger questions:  “What matters most to us? Who are we? What do we owe to one another? How should we live?”

Faust went on:  “As I heard and watched and read reports of the bombings, I, like others, was struck by the way the actions of so many at the scene represented a powerful answer to such questions.  Amid the calamity, there appeared streams of people running toward the chaos, toward the explosions. The first responders — police, firefighters, the National Guard; the raft of doctors, nurses, and EMTs; the trauma surgeon who had just completed the Marathon and ‘rushed in’ by heading straight to the operating room at MGH. The volunteers, the bystanders — women, men, young and old — running toward the unknown, risking their own safety to see if they could help.”

“There was the priest who saw blood, put on his brown Franciscan robe, and made his way into the mayhem; the cardiologist, a volunteer from Texas who thought, ‘OK, so I am about to die,’ and took off his belt to apply as a tourniquet to a victim’s leg even while policemen shouted at him to evacuate; the Army veteran who ‘saw smoke … smelled cordite,’ and ran down the stairs from a post-race party, anticipating more bombs. He saved a college student’s life with a tourniquet made from a T-shirt and reunited a mother and child.  The man in the cowboy hat, who ripped away fencing to reach the most severely injured, and later said simply, ‘My first reaction was to run toward the people.’”

What is so remarkable about these responses, Faust commented, is not primarily the courage they reveal, but perhaps even more importantly, the underlying  “spark of fellow-feeling” that animates the decision to run toward the hurt.   Her advice to the Class of 2013 was that they cultivate this “spark of fellow-feeling” and commit themselves to leading lives of running toward:  “lives motivated, even seized, by something larger than themselves, lives of engagement and commitment and, yes, risk — risk taken in service to the world’s needs and to what matters most.”

Faust’s comments were underscored – indeed, they were embodied – in the graduate student commencement address given by Jon Murad.  Murad received that day his master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School, and was himself a 1995 graduate of Harvard College.  What is unusual about Murad is that, notwithstanding his two Harvard degrees, he is a New York City cop.  Although he has many other opportunities open to him, he has decided to devote his career to being a cop in New York because keeping the world safe for people in one of the world’s great cities really matters and is a job deserving of smart, capable people like him.

Murad’s address was charmingly entitled “In Praise of Clip-on Ties,” in celebration of the uncool, and almost comical, neckwear New York City’s finest are required to wear.  In his remarks, Murad urged his fellow graduates to free themselves of all the stereotypes regarding fitting careers for Harvard graduates.  The measure of a person is not his or her salary or title or rank, he insisted.  Harvard graduates don’t have to end up as investment bankers or big firm lawyers or even fancy college professors at Ivy League schools.  Success is not about rising to the top, Murad said, but about reaching out to change the world for the better.  Meaning is found in running toward the chaos of life, not in seeking to rise above it.

As I was praying over our gospel text this week, in the hopes of cobbling together a sermon, these two addresses kept rattling around in my head.  Until I realized that Faust’s advice and Murad’s challenge were in fact both echoes of the deep truth embedded in today’s gospel lesson.  Upon first hearing, it is easy to categorize the story of the widow from Nain as just another miracle story, a testament to Jesus’ divinity, proof that he is indeed God’s son.

But the heart of the story is not its ending – the resurrection of the widow’s son.  Rather, the key to the story comes before that, in Jesus’ initial response to this woman in mourning, this woman who has lost not only her husband, but now her only son.  Overcome with grief, she feels as if she has lost everything and that her life is over.

And it is precisely into this woman’s deep pain that Jesus steps in verse 13.  The NRSV translation that we heard is the somewhat colorless “and the Lord had compassion for her.”  But this is one of those places where the language actually matters.  The underlying Greek word is not the usual one for compassion, but rather the more literal:  “and the Lord’s heart went out to her.”  His heart went out to her. 

It would have been easy for Jesus to pass the woman by, to go about his business.  He had no obligation to her.  But Jesus is ever attentive to those in pain.  And it doesn’t matter to him whether they are family or friends, Jews or Gentiles, prominent folk or poor widows, believers or not.  Jesus notices those who hurt; and his heart goes out to them.  In such circumstances, it would have been so tempting, so human, to look the other way, to move away from the hurt, out of fear or a sense of inadequacy or of not wanting to get involved.  How many times have you and I done just that?  But Jesus always moves toward the hurt.

And it is not just Jesus’ heart that moves toward the widow.  His hand does as well:  he reaches out to touch the bier (the platform) upon which the widow’s dead son lies.  Never mind the strict Jewish laws forbidding touching such things.  Jesus moves toward the source of the widow’s pain, and with his touch, he brings life where before there was only death, hope where before there was only despair. 

There is in these two short verses an important double movement:  first, compassionate attentiveness to those in distress; and second, a physical move toward them to provide care, comfort, and healing.

We see this very same pattern, of course, in our Old Testament lesson:  the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.   As soon as Elijah hears about the widow’s dying son, he cries out in compassionate prayer, and then he moves toward the son, literally throwing himself on the boy’s pain.

These two stories, in short, offer us a simple, but profoundly important insight into Christian living.  Following Christ means organizing our lives, as we can, around this same double movement:  compassionate attentiveness to those in distress, whomever they are and wherever they are, and a willingness to run toward their pain, to offer whatever care we can.

Such compassionate living needn’t be heroic.  It can be as simple as visiting a friend in a nursing home; or helping a blind man across the street; or volunteering to cook for those who are hungry; or donating those clothes you really no longer need to those who do need them.  But while such acts needn’t be heroic, they do need to become a consistent part of who we are if we are to respond faithfully to Christ’s call.

Not being God or one of his prophets, we cannot guarantee that our compassionate attentiveness and faithful caregiving will always yield miraculous results.  But we are assured by Jesus’ example that God’s deep desire for each of us is to be drawn into such Christ-like lives of compassionate engagement, with the world’s and with each other’s pains.  President Faust may call it embracing a life of running towards.  Jon Murad may call it taking the risk of putting on a clip-on tie to serve others.  Jesus puts it more simply:  follow me.

Amen.